Saturday, November 9, 2013

CATACOMB OF St. THECLA

Also known as the CEMETERY OF ST. PAUL'S LITTLE BRIDGE, 2 km (1.2 miles) from the Basilica of St. Paul, in a palace built in the 1950s

There is mystery about Thecla, a young follower of St. Paul hardly cited by the sources, not mentioned in the New Testament and known from the apocryphal Gospel Acts of Paul and Thecla of the second century

The catacomb is made up of three corridors in a delta shape, each one about 30 m (98 feet) long and about 2.5 m (8 feet) wide, with twenty-two square chapels in twelve of which unique and mysterious intensive burials have been found. They were covered with the "cappuccina" (capuchin) method, covering the graves with bricks in a triangle like the roof of a house

Three historical phases

1) Second half century of the first century AD, commercial purposes with pozzolana quarry and fullonica

2) Late third century. Christian and pagan funerary use

3) Fourth century. Development of the catacomb and construction of the UNDERGROUND SMALL BASILICA with two naves, one of the first underground basilicas in Rome. It became underground storage for barrels in the seventeenth century

The tomb of Thecla is in a big niche

Nearby two painted panels from another site on the Via Cristoforo Colombo: "Veiled praying woman suddenly taken away by a man" maybe scene of a martyrdom and "Two characters seen from the back: one pointing something and the other who looks with his hand on his forehead"

Other very damaged paintings in a simple, linear style, so simple and linear that Mariano Armellini in the nineteenth century described them as "The ugliest pictures in the underground of Rome"